Upcoming Engagments

This performance installation takes audiences on a ride through Alberta’s turbulent oil industry. Featuring stories collected via interviews with the men and women on the front lines of big oil – VISCOSITY invites audiences into one-on-one transactions with actors placing them in the midst of the compelling real life drama of Canada’s most talked about industry.

VISCOSITY was inspired by a piece created and produced by Heather while in Fredericton during the summer of 2014 as artist in residence at the University of New Brunswick at the Notable Acts Festival. It received with a workshop presentation at Theatre New Brunswick’s studio that summer. Theatre Yes will re-investigate the piece in an Alberta context, beginning the final leg of its evolution in January 2018 with the production targeted for Spring 2018.

The reality and complexity of ordinary peoples’ experience working in the epi-centre of Canada’s most contentious and powerful industry is not often given voice in public space. There is power and resonance in facilitating audiences’ connection with women and men whose lives and work are fuel for Canadian society. Viscosity will facilitate transactions between workers and audiences that would not be possible on another context.

Using the methodology of verbatim theatre VISCOSITY will tell the stories of workers in Alberta’s oil industry. The project will take the form of a performance installation, which is driven by storytelling. Actors will animate verbatim stories collected from workers in the petro-chemical industry and perform them in a system of one-on-one encounters with audience members.

Alberta Labour History Institute will be in consultation with Theatre Yes regarding process, including: identifying community participants, interview technique and ethics review standards. Our community participants will reflect the range of demographics, cultures and experiences. VISCOSITY will create an intersectional artistic work, which allows audiences to access contemporary Alberta stories in an utterly unique production, which bridges the distance between installation art and theatre.

The Citadel Theatre has asked Theatre Yes to serve as company is residence for its’ 2017-18 season and in that capacity to develop, and produce a site-specific, immersive performance event to take place in non-traditional theatre spaces in Citadel Theatre complex as part of their 2018 - 2019 season.

Inspired by the windows and vistas in the building AND STILL IT MOVESexplores how truth and perception are both distorted and revealed by psychology. Declared to be a post-truth society, the basic truth of what we see and hear is now called into question in the course of public discourse with alarming regularity, resulting in what amounts to mass cognitive dissonances. Using the works of Raymond Chandler and visual artists Edward Hopper and M.C. Escher as preliminary artistic resources, Theatre Yes’s associates: Heather Inglis, Lora Brovold, Melissa Thingelstad, with playwright Beth Graham will devise a work which takes audiences on physical journey from opulent lobbies to the hidden underground caverns of the Citadel Theatre.

AND STILL IT MOVES will explore how we gaze outward to find the truth, only to find ourselves in a hall of mirrors where accuracy of perception must by measured against the subjective in order to navigate truth.